Description

Locating Television: Zones of Consumption takes an important next step for television studies: it acknowledges the growing diversity of the international experience of television today in order to address the question of ‘what is television now?’

The book addresses this question in two interrelated ways:

by situating the consumption of television within the full range of structures, patterns and practices of everyday life;

and by retrieving the importance of location as fundamental to these structures, patterns and practices – and, consequently, to the experience of television.

This approach, involving collaboration between authors from cultural studies and cultural anthropology, offers new ways of studying the consumption of television – in particular, the use of the notion of ‘zones of consumption’ as a new means of locating television within the full range of its spatial, temporal, cultural, political and industrial contexts.

Although the study draws its examples from a wide range of locations (the US, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, Cuba, and the Chinese language markets in Asia - -Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Taiwan), its argument is strongly informed by the evidence and the insights which emerged from ethnographic research in Mexico. This research site serves a strategic purpose: by working on a location with a highly developed and commercially successful transnational television industry, but which is not among the locations usually considered by television studies written in English, the limitations to some of the assumptions underlying the orthodoxies in Anglo-American television studies are highlighted.

Suitable for both upper level students and researchers, this book is a valuable and original contribution to television, media and cultural studies, and anthropology, presenting approaches and evidence that are new to the field.

Reviews

"This wonderfully theorized book provides a timely call for the field of global media studies. Re-energizing the efforts to explore the mediums increasing global reach it nonetheless emphasizes the crucial need to carefully contextualize the study of television in its ever proliferating locations. Challenging us to find a way to address the particularities of specific locations, or as the writers aptly call it, 'zones of consumption', this meticulously conceptualized and impressively researched volume draws on cultural anthropology and global television studies approaches, promising to enhance the field's investigation into the medium as a global whole without abandoning the particularities through which it is experienced in the daily lives of audience and producers around the world." -Sharon Shahaf, Georgia State University, USA

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Understanding Television Today Chapter Two: Television and the Nation: The Return of the Repressed Chapter Three: Sharedness, Liveness and the Construction of Communities Chapter Four: Television and the Desire for Modernity Chapter Five: Television, Domestic Space and the Moral Economy of the Family Chapter 6: Conclusion

About the Authors

Anna Cristina Pertierra is an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. With interests in media anthropology, material culture and consumption studies, she is the author of Cuba: The Struggle for Consumption (2011) and co-editor of Consumer Culture in Latin America (2012), as well as a number of articles and book chapters.

Graeme Turner is an ARC Federation Fellow and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. A leading international figure in cultural and media studies, his most recent books include Television Studies after TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era (2009) Ordinary People and the Media: The demotic turn (2010), and What’s Become of Cultural Studies? (2011).